Very few people will admit to having a crap time on holidays.
Maybe it’s all the time and effort that goes into making one happen or the excruciating holiday countdowns you have with friends and colleagues before you leave or perhaps it’s the soul-destroying realisation that if “getting away from it all” doesn’t make you happy than nothing will.
Whatever the reason, no matter what happens on holidays, we’ll always say what a great time we had. And usually this is just a big fat lie.
No matter how well you plan or how much money you throw around, there is always something bad about travelling on holidays and it’s time to give some of the worst ones away:
1. Your relationship will suffer: Paul Hansford has written a terrific piece on News.com.au today about how to avoid breaking up on holidays. Almost everyone knows someone who broke up on holidays or very soon after and it always seems to happen to those long term relationships where one party has been holding out for the baby/engagement ring/sign of commitment that the other party either fails spectacularly to deliver, or worse, calls it quits.
Platonic and family relationships aren’t immune either; travel with people you love and be willing to discover a million things about them that you’d rather not know. For example, you could realise that your best friend is actually a complete tight arse, complains a lot, expects you to make all the plans or always has that one extra bag that you end up carrying.
2. Holidays can make you depressed and or sick: Sarah Wilson touched on this back in October after spending a holiday in Bali constantly fretting about not “having enough fun”. They can also make you incredibly homesick and after a day or two you can find yourself yearning for routines or worse, thinking about work.
You’ll probably also get sick either some weird strain of cold and flu from sleeping overnight in an aeroplane and or experience sudden and uncomfortable changes in digestion and toilet habits.
3. The lone traveller/ third wheel/hanger-on: Odds are you’ll meet this person on the first night of your holiday while you’re kicking back in the bar. You suggest they join you for the following day’s sightseeing and the next thing you know they’re stuck to you till the end of your trip. In really unfortunate cases, just when you think you’ve lost them, they’ll turn up at your next destination too.
The chatty, over-sharing tour guide is another example of bad travelling companions. They’re most likely to turn up on tours that take several day and will spend most of the tour talking about themselves and that “first crazy time they hit the Inca trail”.
4. You won’t actually see everything and you’ll miss really important bits: This is known to occur on the holidays you don’t plan because you don’t want to be “like everyone else’ or you want to “get off the beaten track” and usually finds you staying in a generic hotel chain because you couldn’t figure out how to hire car or work out the train ticketing system.
5. The family reunion and other awkward rendezvous: Tracing your family tree might seem enticing from the cosy and familiar environs of home but meeting up with long lost relatives and or friends of friends can go completely pear-shaped. They’re either almost always boring, way too eager to share every last moment of your holiday with you or just never turn up to meet you at the airport.
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